The history of arid-land fox discoveries in North America

Abstract

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1805 wrote the first substantial details of an arid-land fox. It was not until 1823, however, that Thomas Say described this same species of fox scientifically, and gave it a Latin name. Since then several other arid-dwelling foxes have been discovered. It almost seems that each south-western state in the United States and northern Mexico had its own fox, neatly described and named. But with the advent of modern biology and genetics, and the re-thinking of the “species concept”, has the rich history of arid-land fox discoveries become just a footnote? In this paper I bring the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century explorers and naturalists to the modern reader, providing the historical accounts that can only be found in library archives. I focus only on foxes that occur in North American desert and prairie habitats, excluding those fox species that occur in woodland and forested communities.